David Simon, speaking at a forum in Sydney Australia gave a very perceptive rundown about what ails the land of my birth. He points out very eloquently a theme that the Pope and others have been highlighting recently, namely that income inequality is dangerous and if we don't do something about it, we are risking the very nation we claim to love.
You can read the entire thing here-and you should. I want to copy it and stick it in the face of every person who whines about how "socialist" the country is. As I have said before-they don't even know what the word means.
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
Mr Simon is writing about his astonishment that there are those who take utterly reprehensible ideas about abandoning the social compact and the original ideas of America as a commonwealth, in favor of a philosophy of out right selfish behavior.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
This is RMoney's 47% argument well refuted. But thanks to the Zombie Eyed Granny Starver and his buddies, the bad idea lives on and on.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
As I said, the whole article is worth a read.
He’s blabbering.
Yep, another one of those selfish bastards who merely wants ‘his’ share of everything from everyone and claims he got a signed contract that let’s him take it all. Just the kind of guy that sends the SS around to take away your guns so you can’t stop them when they come and take away your stuff later on.
You seem to have drastically missed the point.
If 300 million people in the US all do exactly what you say, there will still be the same number of poor, the same number of jobless, the same wealth gap, the same disparity in education, opportunity and healthcare.
It’s a structural problem.
Capitalism cannot exist successfully without a social compact. And he is quite correctly pointing out that when we have the kind of income inequality we have today-it is a dangerous thing for the stability of the country.
Its not him that’s selfish my friend, its the people who advocate in favor of the plutocracy.
Capitalism existed independently of this social compact you communists blather about, for thousands of years as did income inequality. Recall your Horatio Alger and countless more writers over the millenia who urge us to work hard for our living. The smart ones do well. Those that are born to wealth sometimes do well, those that are born poor and ignorant and choose to remain ignorant do not do well. NOTHING you or anyone else does can make a stupid and ignorant person smart. When you look at income gaps do you consider what happens to professional but stupid pro athletes who die broke? What about lottery winners who are broke and in debt within a couple of years of winning millions of dollars? There will always be a stupid and ignorant section of the population. You only care about them now because they make the news and are in the news. They’ve always been there and they always will.
I was cheered by the recent PISA results. They appear to show that education is not failing anybody in America. Admit that a lot of stupid people are failing education. That’s all part of the great leveler, the simple fact will always remain, half the people are dumber than the other half. Half of the smarter ones get rolled by ideology that has demonstrated to any smart person that it is without merit. They come up with the idea of some sort of social contract.
Yes it did-and as the author pointed out the consequences were bad, very bad, for a lot of undeserving people. It is one reason nothing got done between 500 and 1600 AD.
So basically what you are saying is that you want to return to the 1800’s with lots of people dying well before they should have, families thrust into crime, and a huge gap between rich and poor. That’s how revolutions start-or have you not been paying attention to the last 200 years?
Here’s an idea that hopefully will break through your selfishness-income ineqaulity threatens your safety.
Income inequality will result in a smaller middle class, and the middle class is the largest consumer in any country. When the income of the wealthy increases, they consume a smaller portion of the increase than do other groups, so that 1 billion additional dollars in the hands of the middle and lower classes will result in more consumption than it would in the hands of the wealthy. And the difference in consumption is large. Families borrowing beyond their means was a significant contributor to the financial crisis.
Finally income inequality slows long-term growth and productivity.
But hey, be a selfish pig. I hope your house gets one of the first bricks.
and so they created the worker’s paradise’s in Cuba, China, and Vietnam and Russia and everywhere else they tried this thing where the State owns the people and forces them to work at wages set by the government for the equality that’s in it.
But that’s not what he is saying-and the fact that people use the “S” word in these discussions, deliberately distorts the issue. As he himself said, there is no argument over how the weatlh will be generated, that has been solved. The question however is what are we doing with the wealth we generate and how do we best improve the lot of the most people in a society.
No one said anything about government setting wages or profits. However capitalism must have some regulation in order to prevent its worst excesses. ( A point Mr. Simon makes quite well). And a social compact is necessary to keep the effects of failure, a necessary byproduct of a capitalistic system, from being so catastrophic it breeds crime and violence.
For most of the post-World War II era, we tolerated relatively high inequality because we envisioned it as a necessary side effect of an exceptional economy that (supposedly) guaranteed opportunities for advancement. As the Wall Street Journal put it, we believed that “it is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor … as long as (our) children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring.”
However, the last three decades have invalidated our standing hypothesis. After the conservatives’ successful assault on the New Deal, America has lived a different reality — one perfectly summarized by a new Federal Reserve study revealing that today’s increasing inequality accompanies comparatively low social mobility.
“U.S. family income mobility has decreased over the 1969-2006 time span, and especially since the 1980s,” notes the Fed paper, adding that “a family’s position at (the) end of (the) 2000s was … more correlated with its start position than was the case 20 years earlier.”
Of course, some class mobility still exists. The trouble is that it’s primarily of the downward kind. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reports, roughly a third of those who grew up in the middle class have now fallen below that station in adulthood.
That was dishonest of you. I read that 70% of the doctors in California won’t take the new socialist pay scale for work in that state because it doesn’t even begin to cover their direct costs, not even counting paying off their student loans and malpractice. The State has NO option except to ORDER them to work. Draft them.
We did that before. My grandfather was a doctor and the Army drafted him. Two of my uncles were doctors and they were drafted by the military in the 60’s. My ex-father-in-law was a doctor and the State drafted him and sent him to Alaska. I can’t speak for anybody else but that’s why I utterly reject these profoundly un-American schemes you and others keep coming up with to rob and steal from people what they have earned or inherited simply because you don’t think it’s fair.